Tata Steel has completed an upgrade of its corrosion-resistant coating line in South Wales to improve and expand the company’s range of high-value, high-formability automotive steels.
The Zodiac plant is Tata Steel’s coil galvanising line at Llanwern. Its customers in the automotive industry increasingly require steels that combine high strength with high formability — a combination that enables manufacturers to make more fuel-efficient and lighter-weight vehicles.
The size of the radiant tube section of the line’s annealing furnace, where the steel is given the required mechanical properties ahead of the zinc coating process, was increased as a part of the upgrade. This has enabled an increase in capacity of about 25% to 500,000 tonnes per year. Adding a second roll size to the temper mill, which levels the steel strip after coating, has allowed the move into high-formability steels, while retaining the line’s ability to produce high-strength and dual-phase steels.
Mr Henrik Adam, Tata Steel’s Chief Commercial Officer in Europe, said, “This upgrade has been carried out with the requirements of some of our key European automotive customers in mind. It will enable Tata Steel to play its part in continuing the excellent recent successes achieved by our automotive market sector. Together with Zodiac’s sister lines in Belgium and the Netherlands, we now have greater operational flexibility and can also offer our customers greater reliability of supply.”
